TV – Page 68 – Dangerous Universe

Direct Beam Comms #32

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVJuly 17, 2016July 16, 2016

TV

Stranger Things Grade: A

The new series Stranger Things debuted on Netflix last Friday (July 15) and currently all episode are available to stream.

It’s 1983 and something’s not right in the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Outside of town sits a government installation out of which something has escaped. This thing found young Will (Noah Schnapp) riding home from a game of Dungeons & Dragons one night and stole him away leaving Will’s mother (Winona Ryder), the town police and Will’s friends searching for him.

Also escaped from the installation is a seemingly normal girl only known as “Eleven” (Millie Bobby Brown) from the tattoo on her arm who can do weird things like affect electrical appliances around her and has agents after her led by Dr. Benner (Matthew Modine) who’s willing to kill anyone who gets in his way if it means getting the girl back.

So far Netflix has promoted Stranger Things as a sort of TV version of Steven Spielberg’s movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extraterrestrial and Spielberg produced Poltergeist. And while Stranger Things does borrow elements from this period in Spielberg’s career I’d say that Stranger Things takes more from the work of the other pop-culture titan of the 1980s: Stephen King. Well, King by way of straight to VHS horror films mixed with a pulsating synth keyboard driven soundtrack.

Part of Stranger Things were scary. Really scary.

In the beginning of the first episode when young Will’s being chased by the something I can only described as a human-looking shape, I found the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention. And at another part of the show when Winona Ryder’s character gets a weird phone call I took a breath so that I could hear every creepy thing emanating from the receiver.

That’s not to say that Stranger Things is strictly a horror series, though if I had to peg it in one genera I’d peg it squarely there. It also has elements of sci-fi and a definite sense of nostalgia for the early 1980s and young geek life before video games and the internet changed everything. But it’s not simply some nostalgia throw-back series.

Stranger Things is a show that’s set in the early 1980s but it’s not something that’s defined by that. The series could easily be set present day or the 1960s and would work just as well.

I wasn’t quite the age of the 1983 middle schoolers in Stranger Things but having grown up in Indiana the series gets a lot of what it was like in small town life back then pre-cable. Adults are really into basketball and you may get to watch your favorite show that night or the TV might be on the “fritz” and you might not. If you wanted to talk to your friends and you didn’t want to call their home phone letting the parents know what’s up you had to be creative. And if you were a geek the details in pop-culture matter. In the first episode two characters get into a fight over whether the Mirkwood was in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings which really struck home for me. The details matter to a pre-teen pop-culture junkie, even the seemingly inconsequential ones.

After having watched the first episode the only negative I can see with Stranger Things is that it’s going to be hard — REALLY HARD — to only watch one episode of this series a week and not blow through all eight in a packed Saturday.

The Bureau aka Le Bureau des Légendes Grade: B+

This French series that’s available on iTunes, the first episode of which is free, is an interesting show about spies that feels a bit like the classic British drama The Sandbaggers.

In The Bureau, French operative Guillaume (Mathieu Kassovitz) has returned home to France after eight years abroad on assignment for the DGSE (the French CIA) in Syria. He tells his teenage daughter, with whom he’s trying to rebuild his relationship with, that his job was to “make friends” of certain people and glean any information that might be useful to France from what they might say. He was less James Bond than someone looking to score a little intel for his side. But in Syria he made one mistake; it wasn’t falling in love with a Syrian national, it was lying about ending the relationship to his superiors.

Back home in France things are in a bit of a disarray at the DGSE where one of their operatives has gone missing also in Syria which might act as a domino and bring own several other operations he knew about. At the same time Guillaume, who’s now working as a case officer inside the DGSE, finds out that his love from Syria is also in France attending school. Which begs the question — is Guillaume being played by the other side?

It took a bit for The Bureau to get going in the first episode, and even when it did “get going” it was a slow, but satisfying burn. Here, the agents are less using secret gadgets, gambling at casinos and drinking martinis and more just getting close to important people to glean even the tiniest detail that might somehow be beneficial to France as a whole. But even if their job isn’t like James Bond’s, it’s just as dangerous as since capture of a DGSE agent outside of France might mean death.

And like I said it’s the slow burn, the bureaucracy of governmental work and the life and death stakes of the characters that reminded me somewhat of The Sandbaggers. Though admittedly by the looks of it the budget of an entire season of The Sandbaggers probably wouldn’t cover one episode of The Bureau. 😉

My only quibble with the series is that it’s not easily available here in the US. Overseas in the UK it’s apparently available on Amazon Prime but here it’s only out on iTunes. Which means if I want to watch the rest of the first season it’s going to cost me $20.

So, it looks like I’m going to be out of $20 in the near future.

Star Wars Rebels season 3 preview

Movies

Star Wars: Rogue One “Sizzle Reel”

Cool Sites

Saturday Morning Cartoons: “A collection of Saturday Morning (or Saturday-Morning-Like) cartoons and animated episodes.”

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

1984: The NeverEnding Story premiers in theaters
1985: Day of the Dead premiers in theaters
1986: Aliens opens in theaters
1996: The Frighteners opens in theaters

Opening credits Sunday: Tour of Duty (1987)

TVJuly 10, 2016July 2, 2016

Direct Beam Comms #31

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVJuly 10, 2016July 9, 2016

TV

The Night Of: Grade B

CmxsN4NUEAEfioA I don’t watch any procedural series like NCIS or Chicago P.D. While I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, to me, the stories of those shows move so fast they break the bonds of believability. I caught part of an episode of NCIS once when I was out where the squad was involved in a stakeout where they caught a guy dropping money off at a club, they interrogated the guy and found our where they money was coming from, one of the characters found out that his father died and he flew home, where he went through his father’s things while at the same time the NCIS squad was back out trying to take down this money-moving ring.

And all of this was supposed to have taken place in less than 24 hours and all happened before the halfway mark of the episode. Which to me is way to fast to even be remotely realistic. These stories seem like the Cliff-Notes version of a longer, more satisfying story.

Which made me think — what would happen to these single-episode stories if they were opened up and “let breath” over the course of an entire season? That these procedural series single-episode stories might actually be interesting over the course of many episodes. (And I suppose the opposite is true too, the first season of True Detective could probably be condensed down into a single episode of something like Chicago P.D.)

That’s what I think is happening with the new HBO mini-series The Night Of which premiers tonight (Sunday, July 10). It’s essentially a single episode of something like Law and Order but instead of it all happening in one episode is being told over the course of eight.

In The Night Of, college student Naz (Riz Ahmed) goes out one night to a party and on the way meets a beautiful women and the two both go back to her apartment for a night of drugs and debauchery. Only when Naz awakens early the next morning he finds the woman brutally murdered with blood literally on his hands. What follows are the police investigating the murder and Naz just happening to cross paths with defense attorney Jack Stone (John Turturro).

Which sounds like every other procedural series out there, but I think that since The Night Of is going to play that story out over the course of an entire series might be a really interesting series. With one caveat.

The first half of The Night Of is pretty bad. That part focuses on Naz pre-murder where he’s not just a college student, he’s a college student who tudors student athletes. And he’s only invited to the party because of the athletes. And he only steals his dad’s cab because a friend can’t drive them to the party. And he only accidentally picks up the girl because the “off duty” light on the cab is broken. And he only takes the drugs the girl offers and goes back to her place because she’s beautiful. And because of all this he wakes up in her blood covered apartment charged with murder.

Which to me is a lot of coincidence. Like the creators of the series are so desperate to show Naz as this bright, shining light of character that he’s made almost too good. Less of a real person and more of a martyr not deserving what’s about to happen to him in the criminal justice system.

However, once past this The Night Of gets really good.

Turturro’s character of Jack Stone is really interesting. A lawyer who wears sandals because of his eczema and only takes the case because he happens to be at the police station the night Naz is brought in. Equally compelling is Bill Camp as Detective Box, a cop who’s less world weary and more a cop who’s good at his job but isn’t all that emotionally invested in the cases he investigates.

After watching The Night Of I had to look Camp up since I knew I’d seen his face before and he’s absolutely wonderful in this show. I’d last seen him in the WGN series Manhattan but has been a working actor since the 1990s and has recently been in films such as 12 Years a Slave and Black Mass.

I think if the first episode of The Night Of had ended before the introduction of Stone or Box I would have been done with it after the first episode. Instead I’m really intrigued as to what the future holds for this show.

Cleverman: Grade B

L-R_-Jarrod-Slade-_Iain-Glen__-Koen-West-_Hunter-Page-Lochard_-and-Waruu-West-_Rob-Collins_-photo-Lisa-Tomasetti I’m not even sure exactly how to review Cleverman, the first season of which just ended on Sundance. This series takes place in a near future Australia where a species of human(?) named the “Hairies” have emerged from the outback and integrated themselves into society. But instead of being welcomed, these fur covered super-strong people are instead ghettoized and discriminated against.

Cleverman is an interesting concept and I stuck with the series to the end but there were a few things that bothered me. Like with the Australian specific cultural stuff I was mostly lost. From what I can tell the “Cleverman” who’s a kind of shaman for the Aboriginal Australians is real, but I’m assuming they don’t all have powers like being invulnerable to harm. And I’m assuming that maybe the “Hairies” might be some cultural thing in Aboriginal culture like maybe Bigfoot is here?

Still, the series was enjoyable if a bit over the top with an evil government, mad scientists looking to splice “Hairies” DNA with ours and monsters roaming the countryside ripping the hearts out of unsuspecting Aussies.